At last the decommissioning of paramilitary weapons has been isolated as the issue which can make or break the chain of political development that began with the Belfast Agreement.
A series of statements - by Bertie Ahern in South Africa, David Trimble and Peter Mandleson in London, and Seamus Mallon in Derry - has left no doubt about its importance.
Also, the recent activities of paramilitaries, from Carrickmore to Portadown, have underlined both the urgency of decommissioning and the significance of the part to be played by Gen John de Chastelain.
On Wednesday Mr Ahern said: "Decommissioning of arms by May 2000 was part of the agreement, and that cannot be dodged."
The timing may be questionable, but there's no doubt about Mr Ahern's response to an old republican argument: "How can you say an organisation surrenders by decommissioning when you already have two of your senior members inside the cabinet, directing policy?"
His view of the consequences of failure to decommission coincides with Mr Trimble's.
"The entire thing will fall apart," said the Taoiseach. "Whatever happens after that . . . "
The mere mention of decommissioning irritates Sinn Fein and its supporters, and the deadline "by May" runs counter to unionist expectations.
However, on Thursday Mr Trimble showed no sign of retreating from his threat to resign if he cannot report progress to the Ulster Unionist Council when it reconvenes in mid-February.
If that happens, the agreement will fall and the primacy of politics will have been sacrificed to paramilitary pride, as Mr Mallon made plain during his visit to Derry.
Of course, Mr Ahern is right when he says the issue cannot now be dodged, though it's difficult to banish the memory of that Sunday Times interview and the efforts made to pretend it didn't really mean what it plainly said.
Mr Trimble is right about Gen de Chastelain's timetable: it includes a report, to be made in January, and Mr Mallon is right about the clarity of the commitments and understandings during the negotiations and review.
The primacy of politics is what the parties aimed to assert, and achieve, once discussions got under way.
It wasn't always so, as the State papers for the late 1960s remind us.
The most striking feature of the evidence now available from a variety of sources is how little governments knew of what was going on in the world outside their offices.
Even when they knew what was happening, or imminent, their reactions were either slow or based on old policies which had never been tried or, when tried, had failed.
No one looked to the wider world and thought: young people on this island will follow the example of the civil rights movement in the United States or those on the left now attempting to change the politics of continental Europe.
Instead, the unionists at Stormont persisted in identifying the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association and People's Democracy as their old enemy, the IRA, in a new guise.
Terence O'Neill's efforts at reform were frustrated by opponents in his own party who refused to see, as he did, the inevitability of change.
After all, the NICRA demands - one-man-one-vote, an end to discrimination and so on - were grounded on a proposition that was beginning to win influential support in Britain.
If the demands had been met, as O'Neill ruefully observed in a note written after he'd left office, a lot of trouble would have been avoided. (30 bloody years of trouble)
However, the Stormont government wasn't alone in its failure to recognise what was happening and what needed to be done. Two governments on a small island not only contrived to ignore each other for almost 50 years; they made the same mistakes when it came to the civil rights campaign and the republican movement.
If, in Belfast, O'Neill's colleagues were obsessed by the threats lurking in old police files, the government in Dublin fumbled for relevance in anti-partitionist rhetoric and the nightmares of the Cold War. The most militant anti-partitionists, led by Neil Blaney and Kevin Boland, saw the civil rights campaign as an opportunity to beat the green drum.
So, as it turned out, did Charles Haughey, to the surprise of many who knew him only as one of a new breed of ministers better disposed towards building speculators than towards old-style nationalists.
Those who favoured a less aggressive approach, led by Jack Lynch and Paddy Hillery, were to follow a line suggested by Erskine Childers (later President) in a memorandum written 10 days after fighting started in Belfast.
Childers pointed out that there was no policy on the North. He proposed unity by consent, a conciliatory approach to the unionists and tough control of the IRA.
Ironically, a fortnight later, as he reported progress on reform in the North, a new alliance was beginning between Blaney and his friends and those in the republican movement who opposed its leftward leanings.
For the republicans, too, were divided, on ideology, Northern policy and whether to become more deeply engaged in constitutional politics.
ON the left stood supporters of political activity and campaigns on housing, natural resources and civil rights. On the right stood supporters of a more militaristic approach, their numbers swollen by recruits who feared a recurrence of the loyalist attacks of August 1969.
But differences of approach which, to all intents and purposes, began with the defence of Catholic areas, had ideological origins as well.
Indeed, as Blaney's new alliance took shape and there was a promise of funds to help it, one of the demands made of republicans was for the removal of four left-wing leaders, Cathal Goulding, Seamus Costello, Mick Ryan and Roy Johnston.
The split between Official and Provisional IRA, Official and Provisional Sinn Fein, was to be irrevocable and at times violent; its impact on politics, North and South, has yet to be measured.
It had echoes in the split in Fianna Fail. Some of the events which led to it also led to the dismissal of Haughey and Blaney and the arms trial.
Blaney's friend, Seamus Brady, commented on the trial in the semi-official Voice of the North: "Talk of the future being with doctrinaire socialism and Cuban-style commune politics has been blown sky-high by the events in Dublin.
"These men [Blaney and Haughey] put all the talking revolutionaries, extreme socialists, Trotskyites, Maoists, petticoat revolutionaries in the shade . . . Thank God Ireland still has real republicans."
This generation may be grateful that what it takes to make "a real republican" has finally changed.